A fast IP routing lookup architecture for multi-gigabit switching routers based on reconfigurable systems

With today’s networks complexity, routers in backbone links must be able to handle millions of packets per second on each of their ports. Determining the corresponding output interface for each incoming packet based on its destination address requires a longest matching prefix search on the IP address. Therefore, IP address lookup is one of the most challenging problems for backbone routers. In this paper, an IP routing lookup architecture is proposed which is based on a reconfigurable hardware platform. Experimental results show that the rate of 193 million lookups per second is achieved using our architecture while prefixes can be updated with a rate of 3 million updates per second. Furthermore, it was shown that using our reconfigurable architecture results in rare update failure rate due to resource limitations.